"Some, who seek out everything by reasoning, turn aside from the faith; but reasoning produces shipwreck, while faith is as a safe ship. For where there is no faith, there is no knowledge; when anything springs from our reasonings, it is not [true] knowledge."

St John Chrysostomos

And some who don't use reason end up as Jehovah's witnesses or Pentacostals. -Papist

Well you are wrong, at least in regards to the Jehovah's Witnesses. They are hyper-rational, which is why they don't accept the Trinity, etc.

I disagree. Their inability to understand reason is why they don't understand why the doctrine of the Trinity is not irrational.

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

"Some, who seek out everything by reasoning, turn aside from the faith; but reasoning produces shipwreck, while faith is as a safe ship. For where there is no faith, there is no knowledge; when anything springs from our reasonings, it is not [true] knowledge."

St John Chrysostomos

And some who don't use reason end up as Jehovah's witnesses or Pentacostals. -Papist

Well you are wrong, at least in regards to the Jehovah's Witnesses. They are hyper-rational, which is why they don't accept the Trinity, etc.

I disagree. Their inability to understand reason is why they don't understand why the doctrine of the Trinity is not irrational.

So you can understand all there is to know of the Trinity? It is a logical mind bend, of which we will not ultimately know the answer to. This is why the JWs reject it. It doesn't make sense to the logical mind.

"Some, who seek out everything by reasoning, turn aside from the faith; but reasoning produces shipwreck, while faith is as a safe ship. For where there is no faith, there is no knowledge; when anything springs from our reasonings, it is not [true] knowledge."

St John Chrysostomos

And some who don't use reason end up as Jehovah's witnesses or Pentacostals. -Papist

Well you are wrong, at least in regards to the Jehovah's Witnesses. They are hyper-rational, which is why they don't accept the Trinity, etc.

I disagree. Their inability to understand reason is why they don't understand why the doctrine of the Trinity is not irrational.

So you can understand all there is to know of the Trinity? It is a logical mind bend, of which we will not ultimately know the answer to. This is why the JWs reject it. It doesn't make sense to the logical mind.

Not what I said at all. But I can understand why the Trinity is not irrational. This does not mean that I understand all that there is to know about the Trinity. Read my signature.

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

Including our ability to understand God's revelation. So this could actually go on ad infinitum. But just because something is straw compared to God does not mean it is not good. Mary is straw compared to God but she is worthy of honor and veneration and honor.

« Last Edit: May 15, 2009, 11:53:13 AM by Papist »

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

But just because something is straw compared to God does not mean it is not good.

So then you agree. Reason is straw compared to faith. Thank you. And so tying this into the original thread topic--the IC is an example of reasoning gone awry.

"Some, who seek out everything by reasoning, turn aside from the faith; but reasoning produces shipwreck, while faith is as a safe ship. For where there is no faith, there is no knowledge; when anything springs from our reasonings, it is not [true] knowledge."St John Chrysostomos

But just because something is straw compared to God does not mean it is not good.

So then you agree. Reason is straw compared to faith. Thank you. And so tying this into the original thread topic--the IC is an example of reasoning gone awry.

"Some, who seek out everything by reasoning, turn aside from the faith; but reasoning produces shipwreck, while faith is as a safe ship. For where there is no faith, there is no knowledge; when anything springs from our reasonings, it is not [true] knowledge."St John Chrysostomos

I agree that faith is superior to reason but faith is also straw compared to God.

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

But just because something is straw compared to God does not mean it is not good.

So then you agree. Reason is straw compared to faith. Thank you. And so tying this into the original thread topic--the IC is an example of reasoning gone awry.

"Some, who seek out everything by reasoning, turn aside from the faith; but reasoning produces shipwreck, while faith is as a safe ship. For where there is no faith, there is no knowledge; when anything springs from our reasonings, it is not [true] knowledge."St John Chrysostomos

Catholics don't seek everything according to reason. Some things are revealed but some things can be known by reason.

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

We have already demonstrated it patrisctically on this thread, even from some Eastern Fathers.

You have done nothing of the sort.

I'll finish the next part of this conversation for you:"Yes we did.""No you didn't" "Yes we did!""No you didn't!""Duck Season!""Rabbit Season!""Duck Seaons!!""Rabbit Season!!""Rabbit Season!!!""Duck Seaoson!!!.... Wait..."

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

I'll finish the next part of this conversation for you:"Yes we did.""No you didn't" "Yes we did!""No you didn't!""Duck Season!""Rabbit Season!""Duck Seaons!!""Rabbit Season!!""Rabbit Season!!!""Duck Seaoson!!!.... Wait..."

"O Cross of Christ, all-holy, thrice-blessed, and life-giving, instrument of the mystical rites of Zion, the holy Altar for the service of our Great Archpriest, the blessing - the weapon - the strength of priests, our pride, our consolation, the light in our hearts, our mind, and our steps"Met. Meletios of Nikopolis & Preveza, from his ordination.

The braing exploder is your arguement above.We have already demonstrated it patrisctically on this thread, even from some Eastern Fathers.

If you mean those pathetic quotes, where you try and imply the IC from St. Gregory Palamas, then you are not being truthful. Please show me where the demonstration was, could you please? I can't seem to find it.

If you mean those pathetic quotes, where you try and imply the IC from St. Gregory Palamas, then you are not being truthful. Please show me where the demonstration was, could you please? I can't seem to find it.

If you mean those pathetic quotes, where you try and imply the IC from St. Gregory Palamas, then you are not being truthful. Please show me where the demonstration was, could you please? I can't seem to find it.

Fr. Ambrose admitted that St. Gregory Believed that Mary was without original sin.

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

Fr. Ambrose admitted that St. Gregory Believed that Mary was without original sin.

Here speaketh the Net Guru! Hold on there, my friend! What I said, several times, was the Mother of God was conceived without original sin. I am conceived without original sin. You are conceived without original sin. Pope Benedict was conceived without original sin. Even the Dalai Lama and the Grand Mufti of Moscow....

We are all, including the great Mother of God, conceived in the same spiritual condition.

The other day I was listening to Mark Miravelle, the president of the Vox Populi Mariae Mediatrici crowd who are trying to push the Vatican to proclaiming Mediatrix and Co-redemptrix dogma. He always makes my eyes roll. Anyway, he challenging listeners who disagreed with the dogma to call in (Unfortunately I was driving so couldn't). When someone called in for some Biblical support, he repeated the same MIStranslation of Genesis 3:15 as was in Ineffibilius Deus. Btw, on Dr. M and his pet project:

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""Personally, I'm confident that there will be this recognition of Marian truth before the year 2000,'' says Prof. Mark Miravalle, 39, the leader of the petition drive and a lay theologian at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Miravalle has met with the pope several times and published three books since launchinghis bold initiative at a Marian conference in 1993. An infallible papal definition, he says, would put these doctrines ""at the highest level of revealed truth.''

Rumors of the potential new dogma have triggered blister-ing criticism from other Christian denominations and ignited a battle within the church itself. ""Calling Mary a Co-Redeemer is a heresy in the simplest sense,'' says the Rev. George G. Passias, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

are having their effect. It makes a passing reference to our own "Kolbe," and a telling comment on the Vox Populi and their ilk:

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The Russian Orthodox priest, Fr Sergius Bulgakov, after his own pilgrimage to Lourdes, wrote: "The remembrance of this place embalmed by the presence invisible to our eyes, but clearly perceptible to our souls, of the most holy Mother of God, ...will remain among the dearest memories of our lives. At least in our hearts the interior dividing wall which separates us from the Roman Church has lost much of its opaqueness." Everyone's experience is his own, but this should be balanced by that of the Roman Catholic Robert Hugh Benson, quoted earlier, who experienced the dark side of the Lady of the Grotto. It should, perhaps, also be borne in mind that Fr Sergius' sophiology, considered very suspect by Orthodox theologians like St John (Maximovitch), may have affected his experience—"the Holy Spirit is manifest through the Virgin Mary—she is a creature but also no longer a creature."

[Here, as is her wont, Miriam is erring on the side of kindness, Bulgakov's teachings were not simply considered suspect but were formally condemned by the hierarchs of the Church Abroad and, in 1935, by the Patriarchate of Moscow.—ed.]

It is not obligatory for Roman Catholics to accept the apparitions even when their church has approved them, although some Marianists would like this changed, saying that official approval goes beyond permission to believe and involves infallibility.

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Question a friend, perhaps he did not do it; but if he did anything so that he may do it no more.A hasty quarrel kindles fire,and urgent strife sheds blood.If you blow on a spark, it will glow;if you spit on it, it will be put out; and both come out of your mouth

I am afraid this is NOT an inaccurate understanding of the immaculate Comecption:

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The Immaculate Conception and the Co-redemptrix Written by Mark Miravalle December 01 2007 Page 1 of 6On February 17, 1941, the "Property" of the Immaculata, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo, eventually leading to his martyrdom in Auschwitz. During the few hours before his arrest, Fr. Maximilian was inspired to write the heart of his unparalleled mariological ponderings regarding the "Immaculate Conception."

The following are excerpts from this last written testimony:

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION: These words fell from the lips of the Immaculata herself. Hence, they must tell us in the most precise and essential manner who she really is.

Since human words are incapable of expressing divine realities, it follows that these words: "Immaculate," and "Conception" must be understood in a much more beautiful and sublime meaning than usual: a meaning beyond that which human reason at its most penetrating, commonly gives to them . . . Who then are you, O Immaculate Conception?

Not God, of course, because he has no beginning. Not an angel, created directly out of nothing. Not Adam, formed out of the dust of the earth (Gen. 2:7). Not Eve, molded from Adam's rib (Gen. 2:21). Not the Incarnate Word, who exists before all ages, and of whom we should use the word "conceived" rather than "conception." Humans do not exist before their conception, so we might call them created "conception." But you, O Mary, are different from all other children of Eve. They are conceptions stained by original sin; whereas you are the unique Immaculate Conception.

. . . Creatures, by following the natural law implanted in them by God, reach their perfection, become like him, and go back to him. Intelligent creatures love him in a conscious manner; through this love they unite themselves more and more closely with him, and so find their way back to him. The creature most completely filled with this love, with God himself, was the Immaculata, who never contracted the slightest stain of sin, who never departed in the least from God's will. United to the Holy Spirit as his spouse, she is one with God in an incomparably more perfect way than can be predicated of any other creature.

What sort of union is this? It is above all an interior union, a union of her essence with the "essence" of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, lives in her. This was true from the first instance of her existence. It is always true; it will always be true.

In what does this life of the Spirit in Mary consist? He himself is uncreated Love in her; the Love of the Father and of the Son, the Love by which God loves himself, the very love of the Most Holy Trinity. He is a fruitful Love, a "Conception." Among creatures made in God's image the union brought about by married love is the most intimate of all (cf. Mt. 19:6). In a much more precise, more interior, more essential manner, the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculata, in the depths of her very being. He makes her fruitful, from the very instance of her existence, all during her life, and for all eternity.

This eternal "Immaculate Conception" (which is the Holy Spirit) produces in an immaculate manner divine life itself in the womb (or depths) of Mary's soul, making her the Immaculate Conception, the human Immaculate Conception. And the virginal womb of Mary's body is kept sacred for him; there he conceives in time—because everything that is material occurs in time—the human life of the Man-God. (1)

In a 1933 Letter from Nagasaki, St. Maximilian explains further that in the name, "Immaculate Conception," the Mother also gives us the secret of her very nature:

In her apparition at Lourdes she does not say: "I was conceived immaculately," but "I am the Immaculate Conception." This points out not only the fact that she was conceived without original sin, but also the manner in which this privilege belongs to her. It is not something accidental; it is something that belongs to her very nature. For she is Immaculate Conception in (her very) person. (2)

The uncreated Immaculate Conception and the created Immaculate Conception. The Divine Spirit and the human spouse perfected in His grace are united by an interior, essential union. Uncreated love conceives and dwells within the depths of her soul, and she becomes His quasi-incarnation. (3) For this reason, as St. Maximilian tells us, Mary is also the Mediatrix of all graces and gifts of the Spirit:

The union between the Immaculata and the Holy Spirit is so inexpressible, yet so perfect, that the Holy Spirit acts only by the Most Blessed Virgin, his Spouse. This is why she is Mediatrix of all grace given by the Holy Spirit. And since every grace is a gift of God the Father through the Son and by the Holy Spirit, it follows that there is no grace which Mary cannot dispose of as her own, which is not given to her for this purpose. (4)

Does St. Maximilian go too far in speaking in this manner of the wonders of the Immaculate Conception? Or does he say too little? The Mariology disclosed by the saint of the Immaculata, generous and profound as it is, in no way exhausts the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. His unrivaled pneumatological discoveries prepare the way for a new comprehension of the inseparability of the Uncreated Immaculate Conception with the created Immaculate Conception. But the mystery continues. The brilliance of St. Maximilian's methodology in his return to Trinitarian Mariology specific to the Holy Spirit also propels us to ponder more deeply the other relationships of the Immaculata with her Triune God.

Perhaps least developed of these, from a Trinitarian perspective, is the relationship between the Immaculate Conception and the Heavenly Father. The Father-daughter relationship is one of the most precious of human relationships, and no other relationship captures more the love of the Creator for creation, and the appropriate reciprocal love of creation for the Creator than the relationship between the Eternal Father and Mary Immaculate. At the heart of this union of Perfect Daughter to Perfect Father, which represents and exemplifies how every creature should be united to its Creator, is the stainlessness and fullness of grace possessed by the Immaculate Daughter. This "stainless-fullness" is given to her by the Eternal Father through the Spirit and in view of the foreseen merits of the Son, which is the foundation of her perfect response of fiat-love to everything given to her and asked of her by her "Abba," God the Father of all mankind.

As the example of St. Maximilian makes clear, the dogmatic proclamation of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 does not end its doctrinal development, but rather encourages more unveiling and more appreciation of its sacred mystery. Certainly Contemporary Mariology would do well to follow the example of St. Maximilian in striving to incorporate a more Trinitarian perspective and methodology in relation to the Blessed Virgin if we seek to be true to the full glory of Mary Immaculate....

Question a friend, perhaps he did not do it; but if he did anything so that he may do it no more.A hasty quarrel kindles fire,and urgent strife sheds blood.If you blow on a spark, it will glow;if you spit on it, it will be put out; and both come out of your mouth

. . . Creatures, by following the natural law implanted in them by God, reach their perfection, become like him, and go back to him. Intelligent creatures love him in a conscious manner; through this love they unite themselves more and more closely with him, and so find their way back to him. The creature most completely filled with this love, with God himself, was the Immaculata, who never contracted the slightest stain of sin, who never departed in the least from God's will. United to the Holy Spirit as his spouse, she is one with God in an incomparably more perfect way than can be predicated of any other creature.

What I bolded resembles Enlightened thinking to me. I won't continue on my opinions regarding the Enlightenment; however, whoever wrote the quoted text never saw Twitter.

Irish Hermit thanks , i know it was brought up into discussion earlier in this thread , but it was not clarefied , I would like to know a lot more regarding the greeting of the angel "Hail Mary , full of grace" . Let`s discuss it .

Irish Hermit thanks , i know it was brought up into discussion earlier in this thread , but it was not clarefied , I would like to know a lot more regarding the greeting of the angel "Hail Mary , full of grace" . Let`s discuss it .

Fr. Ambrose admitted that St. Gregory Believed that Mary was without original sin.

Here speaketh the Net Guru! Hold on there, my friend! What I said, several times, was the Mother of God was conceived without original sin. I am conceived without original sin. You are conceived without original sin. Pope Benedict was conceived without original sin. Even the Dalai Lama and the Grand Mufti of Moscow....

We are all, including the great Mother of God, conceived in the same spiritual condition.

So you are a Pelagian?

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You are right. I apologize for having sacked Constantinople. I really need to stop doing that.

In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 3, Adam and Eve committed a sin, the original sin. The Eastern Orthodox Church teaches that no one is guilty for the actual sin they committed but rather everyone inherits the consequences of this act; the foremost of this is physical death in this world. This is the reason why the original fathers of the Church over the centuries have preferred the term ancestral sin. The consequences and penalties of this ancestral act are transferred by means of natural heredity to the entire human race. Since every human is a descendant of Adam then 'no one is free from the implications of this sin' (which is human death) and that the only way to be freed from this is through baptism. [...] Orthodoxy would not describe the human state as one of "total depravity" (see Cyril Lucaris however). One writer has said that "if Latin babies are born blind, and Pelagian babies are born with 20/20 vision, then Greek babies are born in need of spectacles" (ref?). Orthodox Christians have usually understood Roman Catholicism as professing St. Augustine's teaching that everyone bears not only the consequence, but also the guilt, of Adam's sin. This teaching appears to have been confirmed by multiple councils, the first of them being the Council of Orange in 529. This difference between the two Churches in their understanding of the original sin was one of the doctrinal reasons underlying the Catholic Church's declaration of its dogma of the Immaculate Conception in the 19th century, a dogma that is rejected by the Orthodox Church. However, contemporary Roman Catholic teaching is best explicated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which includes this sentence: ""original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted" (§405).

« Last Edit: May 27, 2009, 08:52:01 AM by AlexanderOfBergamo »

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"Also in the Catholic Church itself we take great care that we hold that which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and properly Catholic" (St. Vincent of Lérins, "The Commonitory")

So, dear Papist, we're not Pelagian. We believe that we are all potential sinners, but we become guilty only when we actually sin. This way, Baptism is still necessary, infants need no extra-grace from God to avoid limbo, and Mary was just prevented from committing sins after her birth because she was led and assisted by God's grace... Our tradition explains this through the narration of Mary as a baby being nourished directly by angels and living separately from the outer world...

Hope this helps you in understanding our faith.

In Christ, Alex

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"Also in the Catholic Church itself we take great care that we hold that which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and properly Catholic" (St. Vincent of Lérins, "The Commonitory")